Technical Academy Tour

Today marks the beginning of the Technical Academy Tour as Academy Coordinator, Miles Pool, VP Technology, Paul Shannon and later, former apprentice, Mia Filisch head out across the UK to talk about our Technical Academy.

Continuous learning has always been part of the culture at 7digital and the Technical Academy allowed us to focus those ideas and start hiring apprentices. Changing the team entry requirements and providing a defined period of training allowed us to attract people from more diverse backgrounds and has increased the proportion of female developers in our team; it’s also strengthened the culture of learning and knowledge sharing at every level.

Our talk will feature on Thursday 12th May 2016 at Agile Manchester, followed by a shorter version and the publication of our paper on the subject at XP2016 in Edinburgh at the end of May 2016. The full talk will be back with Mia assisting Paul in Falmouth for Agile on the Beach in early September 2016. We’ve already had our practice run at JUST EAT’s offices so if you can’t attend any of these events and want to learn about our experience, please let us know and we might be able to come and see you.

The talk and paper cover the 3 iterations of the Technical Academy. We talk about the problem we were trying to solve and how we kicked off the whole idea in 2012. We’ll cover the key changes we made throughout the 3 iterations bringing in pull based learning, product team led projects and self-led learning sessions to name a few. We can then show some of the positive changes we’ve seen in the team, and an insight into the effect on some of our team metrics.

Why metrics? Since I joined 7digital I've seen the API grow from a brand new feature side by side with the (then abundant) websites to be the main focus of the company. The traffic grew and grew and keeps on growing in an accelerated pace and that brings us new challenges. We've brought the agile perspective into play which has made us adapt faster and make fewer errors but: